THE CONVENT AS AN HISTORICAL FACT.
From the point of view of history, of reason, and of truth, monastic life must be condemned.
Monasteries when they abound in a nation are tourniquets applied to circulation, oppressive fixtures, centres of idleness where centres of activity are needed. Monastic communities bear the same relation to the great community of society that the mistletoe does to the oak, or the wart to the human body. Their prosperity and their plumpness are the impoverishment of the country. The rule of the monastery, salutary at the beginning of civilizations, useful in bringing about the subjugation of brutality by the spiritual, is harmful in the ripe strength of a nation. Further, when it relaxes and when it enters into its period of decadence, as it still sets the example, it becomes harmful by the very reasons which made it healthful in its time of purity.
The cloister has had its day. Monasteries, helpful to the early education of modern civilization, have checked its growth, and hindered its development. As an educating force and a means of formation for man, the monasteries, good in the tenth century, questionable in the fifteenth, are abominable in the nineteenth. The monastic leprosy has eaten almost to the bone two great nations, Italy and Spain, the one the light, the other the splendor of Europe for ages; and at our own time, these two illustrious nations have only begun to heal, thanks to the strong and vigorous treatment of 1789.
The convent, the old convent for women especially, such as it still appeared at the threshold of this century, in Italy, in Austria, in Spain, is one of the most gloomy concretions of the Middle Ages. The cloister, this very cloister, is the point of intersection of terrors. The Catholic cloister, rightly so-called, is all filled with the black rays of death.
The Spanish convent is especially doleful. There in the dim light, under misty arches, beneath domes made vague by the shadows, rise altars massive as the Tower of Babel, lofty as cathedrals; there in the gloom huge white crucifixes hang by chains; there stand out naked against the ebony background, huge white Christs of ivory—more than bloody, bleeding; frightful yet grand, the elbows showing the bone, the kneepans showing the ligaments, the wounds showing the flesh; crowned with thorns of silver, nailed with nails of gold, with drops of blood in rubies on the forehead and tears of diamonds in the eyes. The diamonds and rubies look wet, and draw tears from those down below in the gloom,—veiled beings, whose sides are wounded by the hair shirt and by the scourge with iron points, their bosoms crushed by wicker jackets, their knees galled by prayer; women who believe themselves brides, spectres who believe themselves seraphim. Do these women ever think? No. Have they wills? No. Do they love? No. Do they live? No. Their nerves have turned to bone, their bones to stone. Their veil is woven of the night. Their breathing under the veil is like some tragic respiration of death. Their abbess, a phantom, hallows them and terrifies them. The Immaculate is there, implacable. Such are the old monasteries of Spain. Retreats of fearful devotion, caves of virgins, savage wildernesses.
Catholic Spain was more Roman than Rome itself. The Spanish convent was pre-eminently the Catholic convent. It had a touch of the East about it. The Archbishop, kislar-agar of heaven, locked up and watched this seraglio of souls reserved for God. The nun was the odalisque, the priest was the eunuch. The devoted were chosen in their dreams, and possessed Christ. By night the beautiful young man descended naked from the cross and became the rapture of the cell. High walls guarded from every living distraction the mystic sultana who had for her sultan the Crucified One. A mere glance outside was an infidelity. The in pace took the place of the leather sack. What they threw into the sea in the East, they threw into the earth in the West. In both places, women's arms were writhing; for these the sea, for those the grave; here the drowned, there the buried. Dreadful analogy!
To-day, the champions of the past, since they cannot deny these things, have adopted the course of making light of them. They have made it the fashion, this convenient and strange way of suppressing the revelations of history, of weakening the commentaries of philosophy, and of getting rid of all troublesome facts and all grave questions. "Matter for declamations," say the able ones. "Declamations" repeat the fools. Jean-Jacques, a declaimer; Diderot, a declaimer; Voltaire on Calas, Labarre and Sirven, a declaimer. They have made it out now that Tacitus was a declaimer, that Nero was a victim, and that we really ought to feel very sorry for "poor Holofernes."
Facts are obstinate, however, and hard to disconcert. The writer of this book has seen with his own eyes, within eight leagues of Brussels, and that is a part of the Middle Ages which every one has at hand, at the Abbey of Villers, the dungeon-hole in the middle of the meadow which used to be the court-yard of the cloister; and on the banks of the Thil, four stone cells, half under ground, half under water. These were the in pace. Each of these cells has the remains of an iron door, a latrine, and a barred window, which from the outside is two feet above the water, and from the inside is six feet above the floor. Four feet of river wash the outside of the wall. The floor is always wet. The tenant of the in pace had for a bed this wet earth. In one of these cells there is a broken piece of a collar fastened to the wall; in another may be seen a kind of square box made of four slabs of granite, too short to lie down in, too low to sit up in. They put into that a human being with a stone lid over her. This exists. You can see it. You can touch it. These in pace, these cells, these iron hinges, these collars, this high window, close to which flows the river, this stone box closed with a granite lid like a tomb, with this difference, that here the corpse was a living being, this floor of mud, this sewer, these oozing walls,—what declaimers these are!